Heide Fasnacht: Drawn to Sublime

May 14 – July 1, 2005

Kent Gallery is pleased to present Drawn to Sublime, an exhibition of drawings and sculpture by Heide Fasnacht. The show will feature an installation of new sculptures that use the walls, ceiling, and floor of the gallery as contact points in the transformation of energy. Glasses and bottles – unique, hand-built aquaresin casts – gather energy, break, and come to rest against every plane in the room. The show will also include a selection of drawings realized over the last ten years, renderings of moments of energetic release – explosions, the pulse of vision, tracks of running water – in marks that range from pencil to puncture to burn.

The visible world, full of animate things in continuous motion, is the focus of Heide Fasnacht’s drawings, sculpture, and installations. Often based on photographs from slightly dated science textbooks and magazines, her subjects encompass volcanoes, geysers, sneezes, bomb blasts, rapid eye movement, rain, and most recently, exploding glasses and champagne bottles. Fasnacht’s art is based in the phenomenological examination of experience. She explores notions of objectivity in work that concentrates on the processes of perception rather than mere representation.

Since Fasnacht’s first one-person show at P.S. 1 in 1979, she has had over twenty-five solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and “Tableaux Écrans,” curated by Catherine Perret for the Galerie les Filles du Calvaire in Paris and Brussels. Fasnacht has received several distinguished grants and awards, notably the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, the Gottlieb Foundation Grant, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, and the Pilchuck Artist-in-Residence in Seattle.